Pagan appropriators, allies, and other weirdness (was Pagan Version of NAFPS Forming)

[educatedindian]

An alert put out by a pagan group:

http://www.paganlibrary.com/editorials/scam.php
SCAM***
Divine Circle of The Sacred Grove
ADF - Office of the Preceptor
PO Box 66311, Seattle, WA, USA 98166
THE FOLLOWING IS FOR PUBLICATION
To the Pagan Community:
In July of 1991, ADF sent out a Druid Alert about an organization called the Divine Circle of the Sacred Grove. ADF began investigating this group because they were using ADF letterhead, membership forms, advertising copy, and other materials with their names substituted for ours. Prior to raising any public issues, ADF's Preceptor, Domi O'Brien called the group and talked to their Scribe, Kal Mannis. Mr. Mannis told her that if she had questions, she could come to a public meeting on July 2nd, 1991, in Seattle, and ask them there.

Domi, Bwca, Erynn and members of 4 other Traditions and organizations attended their talk. We noted with increasing amazement their claims and their views of the interrelationship of Druidism and Wicca, and after they mentioned Isaac Bonewits, Domi challenged some of their statements, as the ADF Preceptor. The DCSG literature going back to 1988 was examined, along with other statements which have been made to us or others. Janette Laverna Garcia a/k/a Gordon a/k/a Copeland, born 2/9/1942, Houston TX,; Richard Norman Ian Garcia a/k/a Gordon a/k/a Copeland, born 8/12/1940, Prescott, AZ; Jerry Eugene Everett Wayne Reamer a/k/a Prophet, born 8/12/1948, Pottstown, PA; Kalman Mannis, Nancy Brown, Brenda Matarazzo, David Trippey, Donovan Cotton; Dr. Jay Tibbles, Mary Ernst, and others affiliated with their group were examined for legitimate mundane and magickal credentials. The only person whose credentials we were able to verify was Dr. Jay Tibbles.

Janette's claims, as given in her various pieces of literature, and as made to us, or to persons whose credentials we were able to verify, include: Hereditary Witch and Druid; Pipe Carrier for the Lumbee, the Sioux, the Cherokee, and the Chumash; member of the MotherGrove and Board of Directors of the ADF, as well as group marriage to the entire ADF Board of Directors; membership and 3rd Circle status in the British Circle of the Universal Bond; training by Ross Nichols, 3rd Degree Celtic and Egyptian Priestess; 3rd Degree Alexandrian Priestess, New York, 1973; 3rd Degree Gardnerian Priestess, New York, 1965; incorporation of her organization in 14 states; training by Rhuddlwm Gawr, and training by Grandmaster Eli (Barney Taylor, of the Druidic Craft of the Wise), marriage to Eli, as well as being both Eli's daughter and granddaughter. She has also claimed to be a registered nurse, a cosmetologist; a paralegal; a professional writer of romance novels, and a Vietnam Veteran. Ms. Copeland (?) claims that she has 10,000 people on her mailing list, groves all over the United States, and that she was born in London during the Blitz, although she has also claimed that she was born in Houston TX. Ms Garcia (?) claims that her father, a U.S. Army Major on Eisenhower's staff during WW II (not, by the way, Grandmaster Eli), and her mother, a nurse now resident in Atlanta, were both members of the Circle of the Universal Bond. She claims that she was raised by a Cherokee grandfather. She claims to have been teaching Wicca, which she says is a simplified version of Druidism for the masses, since 1954, when she was 12 years old.

Ms Gordon(?) took Lady Sabrina's course from Our Lady of Enchantment in 1987 and 1988, giving totally different information about herself then she gives now. According to Lady Sabrina, Janette has been selling Sabrina's courses as her own ever since. We have examined lessons from Janette's and Sabrina's courses, and they are indeed substantially identical, except that Sabrina can spell.

Janette joined ADF in 1987, giving yet another set of data about herself, claiming no leadership positions, newsletters, or other affiliations. A check of the material on her application shows it to be substantially false.

In checking Janette's claims, we contacted the Secretary of State, and Board of Nursing Registrations in the 14 states in which she claimed incorporation. Her organization is incorporated only in Washington and California. She is not listed as a registered nurse anywhere we checked. She and her group were offering BA's, MA's, and PhD's in Washington State until directed to cease and desist by the Higher Education Coordinating Board. They later obtained a religious exemption by saying that they were offering degrees only in Divinity and Theology. Former members of their organization state that most of their claims in their catalog as to available courses and faculty credentials are false.

[educatedindian]

Pt 2

In examining their other claims we contacted over two hundred persons and groups in this country and abroad in an effort to authenticate their initiations and organizational affiliations.

No one we contacted verified any of the DCSG's claims. All stated that they had never trained or initiated any known officers or members of the DCSG. Most had never even heard of them. Further, former members of her organization have mentioned paying thousands of dollars for courses, and additional thousands paid out on "tithes" - 10% of their annual income to support the work of the Order of Melchizadek (demanded in the middle of their initiation or elevation rituals). We have also been contacted by Social Services, Education, Law Enforcement and other authorities for other information about DCSG, and/or its members.

ADF and some other Pagan groups and organizations are cooperating fully with these investigations, and have made it clear to the investigators that we do not regard these people as legitimate members of the Pagan community, since none of their alleged training and initiations can be verified, and may have been directly disproved. As Pagans, whatever our path, we can ill-afford to remain silent while groups knowingly steal and sell courses written by others, claiming training ties to the most senior and respected members of our community that they do not have, and engage in questionable behavior presenting themselves as our kin, elders, and representatives to the world at large.

Domi O'Brien            T. Bwca           Erynn Darkstar
DTG Priestess           Elder, NECTW      Greenleaf Coven
CWO Priestess                             Inis Glas
Preceptor/Vice ArchDruid, ADFBy: Domi O
To: Lewis Stead
Re: Details, please.
Lady Sabrina was initiated by Bob Moshier and Dorothy Trion in Tucson, Arizona in 1978, according to what she says. She was in Danville, California for a while, near San Francisco; and was in COG (I have not checked this); she then studied with Gavin and Yvonne in New Bern for 1 and a half years; then moved to Billerica, Mass; then to Hudson, NH; then Nashua, NH. I was in Epping, NH when a Gardnerian friend and fellow NH College administrator, Gerry Reilly, introduced me to Sabrina. Since I am Daughters of the Triple Goddess and Celtic Wiccan Order trained, Gerry's brand of witchcraft and Sabrina's struck me equally weird.

I talked to Gavin and Yvonne last week; they feel Sabrina has borrowed heavily from them but they don't have an issue with it and they don't consider their organization and hers to be connected. In 1987 Geraldine Gumm aka Gerri Garcia aka Queen Druid aka Laura Copeland aka Janette Gordon aka Janette Copeland aka Laverna Gordon aka Laverna Copeland aka Gerry Garcia aka Gerri Gunn aka Gerri Teah Garcia aka Jerry Leah Garcia took Sabrina's course; in winter of 1989 she began advertising a correspondence course in Wicca, which according to Sabrina is Sabrina's. I've looked at them; they are very much alike. The Frosts and Sabrina both teach non-mainstream Wicca and charged for Craft when no one was doing that. I have heard far more negative things about some far more mainstream figures; both the Frosts and Sabrina are very public and really seem to have nothing to hide. What they teach isn't my Craft, but I will defend their right to practice their version and teach it as they see fit. Or did you mean something else ? Domi of ADF

By: Domi O
To: Corwynt
Re: ADF letter
Indeed it is from us. Since then, we have gotten "Janette's" arrest and conviction records from New Mexico and word from a usually reliable source that her real name may be Geraldine Gumm, and real date of birth may be 2-9-40. I am also informed by a law enforcement source that she has other records in several states. These range from child neglect to unlawful touching of dead bodies to kidnapping.

Her group was investigated in 1975 in Arizona for dead bodies and missing persons, moved a bit over a hundred miles as the crow flies, and she and her husband were arrested in New Mexico in 1978. The children involved were returned to their parents, two being kept in social service custody while it was determined to whom they belonged, and two members of the group were "deprogrammed" by Ted Patrick. She was calling herself "Queen Druid" then and initiating folks as "WI" or "witch one". I have a lovely pile of court papers and newspaper clippings I will gladly share with anyone who'd like to send me $4 for photocopying and postage...
Domi O'Brien
Box 66311
Seattle, WA 98166

[Ganieda]

Stay away from anything written by Douglas Monroe "21 Lessons of Merlin",   D.J.Conway "By Oak, Ash, & Thorn", or Edain McCoy "Witta"


[One reviewer of this (Douglas Monroe) author: "I keep seeing references to a supposed medieval Welsh manuscript called The Book of Pheryllt. I have a suspicion that most, if not all of these references, are inspired by the truly wretched and quite idiotic book The 21 Lessons of Merlyn by Douglas Monroe. Monroe, who has neither Irish nor Welsh, refers to The Book of Pheryllt as a sixteenth century manuscript of arcane Welsh mystical learning.
"Drivel" is the most polite way I can refer to Monroe's claims. There is no such sixteenth century manuscript. Monroe's recent "sequel" to 21 Lessons of Merlyn, The Lost Books of Merlyn is an obvious fake from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, full of egregious factual errors and offensive sexist and racist assumptions." ]


Recommended scholars to read: Peter Berrisford Ellis, Stuart Piggott,  Mircea Eliade, Patrick K Ford, ....

a pretty good list can be found at:
http://www.digitalmedievalist.com/bibs/celtkit.html

[Barnaby_McEwan]

Recommended scholars to read: [...] Mircea Eliade, [...]

You have got to be joking. Eliade was an abysmal scholar and, before WWII, an enthusiastic fascist.

Edmund R. Leach, in 'Sermons by a Man on a Ladder' (New York Review of Books, Oct 20, 1966), charges Eliade with

...bad history—there has never been a radical discordance between Christian cosmology and cyclical notions of time; bad ethnography—it is not true that the cosmologies of "archaic" man always incorporate notions of cyclical time; bad method—comparative ethnography in the style which Eliade employs, can only illustrate by example, it can never properly be used as a basis for generalization; bad psychology—Eliade takes for granted the Lévy-Bruhl fashions of his youth which assumed that ethnographic evidence reflects a pre-logical archaic mentality radically different from that of rational thought (Lévy- Bruhl himself abandoned this theory in his later years); confusion of terms—the most interesting parts of Eliade's writings become fogged by his failure to distinguish clearly between the content of a set of symbols and its structure.

He goes on:

A man who publishes a dozen books within fifteen years and appends over a thousand references to at least three of them is probably learned in only a rather superficial sense, but Eliade's long book lists at least indicate what he has not read and in some cases this test is quite shattering. Eliade's basic thesis depends on the recognition that the metaphysical polarity represented by our words sacred and profane is tied up with an awareness of temporal alternation [...] Now this theme has received great attention from professional anthropologists for many years but all modern [i.e. mid sixties] work is heavily indebted to three classic sources: Mauss (1960), Hertz (1907), Van Gennep (1909), any one of which is far more illuminating than the whole corpus of Eliade's writings put together. But the odd thing is that Eliade ignores them. There are references to Van Gennep's work in the footnotes (but not in the text) of several works published since 1958; the other two items are not mentioned at all. Whatever may be the explanation for this silence it can do Eliade no credit. I am not suggesting that his erudition is wholly fake but that his knowledge of the history of anthropology must be abysmal. This is not a subject which can be understood by reading predigested textbooks and scrabbling through an index to find an appropriate reference. The latest theoretical doctrine of which Eliade shows any understanding is that of the Vienna school of diffusionist culture-history which flourished between 1905 and 1935; functionalism has passed him by and there is no indication that he has ever heard of Lévi-Strauss, who has often concerned himself closely with the kinds of fact which Eliade makes central to his analysis.

Further:

Eliade is a library scholar. What matters for him is that everything he says should be based on what someone else has put in a book. The printed word is authority enough and since there are enough oddities around to write almost everything, it is always quite easy to find "authoritative support" for one's own opinions. This again was Frazer's procedure. If Eliade writes:

    Recent researches have clearly brought out the "shamanic" elements in the religion of the paleolithic hunters. Horst Kirchner has interpreted the celebrated relief at Lascaux as a representation of a shamanic trance. [Shamanism, p. 503]

most readers will believe him simply because it fits the argument. They will be quite unimpressed by the pedant's comment that there are in fact no "reliefs" at Lascaux and that no one has the slightest idea why the paintings were made.

Eliade never went near any 'shamanic' peoples. There's no record of him visiting an Indian reservation or talking to Indians living in Chicago when he was teaching there: he preferred instead to shoe-horn second-hand references into his pre-existing framework of ideas. I won't even get onto his belief that there could be no African shamans or his belittling of female ritualists.

I'm going to recommend, again, that you read Alice Beck Kehoe's Shamans and Religion[/url].

In interwar Romania, Eliade was a leading intellectual supporter of the violently antisemitic League of the Archangel Michael, Romania's principal fascist movement, also known as the Romanian Iron Guard. Here's Eliade talking about Jewish immigration:

Only a pro-German government can save us [...] What is happening on the frontier with Bukovina is a scandal, because new waves of Jews are flooding into the country. Rather than a Romania again invaded by kikes, it would be better to have a German protectorate.

Mihail Sebastian, Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years. Ivan R. Dee, 2000. ISBN 1-56663-326-5[/url] p. 238.

Edited to improve accuracy:
Eliade never apologised or showed remorse for being part of a movement which murdered between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews as well as over 11,000 Roma.

[gus]

Hi Robin,
I was accused of being you on the celtic connections website !
check out the "im fed up of talikng to these people " in the fraud forum.
Anyway OBOD has a lot of dodgy stuff including misapropriation of native culture ( I inadvertantly started a bit of a storm there cos of that), and then theres the money thing..... but you do get some good peeps., language resources etc
my favourite quote from one member was was :

"As a Welsh woman who lives in Wales and who speaks Welsh I find it amusing that this group all live in America.

I haven't heard of them before, nor have I ever heard the tradition that they lay claim to.

Sounds more like a "secrect society" play at being Welsh."

(=;

[Sue]

I'm wondering how their efforts would face different problems for ours. For one thing there's far fewer equivalents of actual elders they could turn to.

For another the whole question of who's an imposter or not is more difficult.

Even sexual abuse and exploitation for money are more difficult issues since charging is seen as alright by most and sleeping with your teacher is sometimes common.

As a new member and a Pagan I am absolutely appalled that someone calling themselves Educatedindian could get it so wrong. Who on earth told you that sleeping with our Pagan teachers is sometimes common? And how facetious to claime that fare fewer equivalents of elders

[Barnaby_McEwan]

Who on earth told you that sleeping with our Pagan teachers is sometimes common?

This is common knowledge. Due to the sexual predilections of its inventor, Gerald Gardner, many "Traditional" Wiccan ceremonies involve ritual nudity, blindfolding, binding, flagellation and sexual intercourse, do they not?

In the 'scene', if not outside, it is common knowledge that sexual predators abound (this page probably not suitable for work):

...these days anyone approaching the occult has to be very careful of just who they trust and a young woman or a pretty boy needs to "trust no one" because the occult scene is full of people with "problem" sexualities and who have strange sexual desires only too happy to take advantage of the initial enthusiasm to learn in order to trap them into a sexual involvement.

(My emphasis)

And how facetious to claime that fare fewer equivalents of elders

"The Old Religion" is a bit younger than Elvis would be if he was still with us. Gardner, as well as being a perv, lied about his academic and masonic qualifications. He invented or plagiarised most of the Wiccan liturgy. Many pagans including leaders and 'scholars' have an equally cavalier attitude to reality when they can tear themselves away from inter-group rivalries and getting into the new initiate's knickers. It shouldn't be surprising if non-pagans take the view that neo-pagan candidates for elder status are as rare as unicorns.

[4Candles]

Have just read this posting with interest as I am Pagan.

This is common knowledge. Due to the sexual predilections of its inventor, Gerald Gardner, many "Traditional" Wiccan ceremonies involve ritual nudity, blindfolding, binding, flagellation and sexual intercourse, do they not?

I think there is some confusion here, possibly because the British use of the word Wicca and Paganism is sometimes very different from that in the US.

Sometimes when people first come to Paganism, especially Witches, they use the much vaunted term Wicca because it makes it sound so much less like something evil. The word Witch is a very old word meaning wise woman, the village elder who knew the secret of healing with herbs etc. The idea of an old wizzened crone was invented when Christianity came in an effort to inject some evil into the actions of the healers and wise people. It was important for the new religion of Christianity to have the people go to the church for healing as it is written that healing only comes through Jesus Christ and not from some old woman with a bunch of herbs. The church became very good at healing and monks began apothercary gardens and so many went to them for help too.

In fact you are quite correct when you say Wicca is a very recent invention. the word Wicca is however, commonly used in the US to denote all Paganism. We tend to be more specific in the UK and only use the name Wicca to determine a small group of followers of Gardner.

It would be totally wrong to label all UK Pagans as Wiccan. We follow many paths and only a small minority are actually followers of Gardner and they say to be truly Wiccan you have to be initiated into a hereditary coven that traces its beginnings back to Gardner himself.

Now whether the sex thing goes on in these very few groups is a matter for conjecture. I think it may well have gone on in the past but we are told it happens only these days between Wiccan partners or man and wife.

It would be very wrong and extremely insulting to the average Pagan to be told that they are involved in any sexually abusive regime. Just as insulting as it would be to you if we said that your culture encouraged and embraced this sort of thing which I am sure it doesn't.

The Pagan Federation is involved with all paths and you will find that real Wiccans, those who are associated with Gardner are very few and far between. Please do not lump us all together - we often have  very different views and paths.

The average Pagan is someone who honours the earth and the positive energy that surrounds us all. We celebrate the changing seasons and life itself, just as our forebears did for thousands of years. Many of us are in the caring professions and most of us are quite spiritual in our own way.

We care about things like global warming, a larger than average percent of pagans are vegetarian and most of us are into recycling in a big way. A lot of us study the use of herbs in medicine, just as all our ancesters did whatever our country.

Paganism is the belief system of many thousands of years before Christianity came to our shores. It has nothing to do with Gerald Gardner; that came much later and is a new kid on the block. We call Paganism the old religion or the old ways because that is what it is. It is certainly much older than Elvis!


Bright blessings to you all 

[educatedindian]

4candles, many of our white members are pagan or been involved with/interested in paganism at some point. I believe one of our members is even from a family tradition of witches. My experience has been that while there are some pagans who take part in exploitation either from not knowing any better or just not caring about anyone but themselves, many others are also quite supportive of Natives efforts vs exploiters.

In answer to Sue's complaints, who seems to have left, what I said earlier was what I've heard repeatedly from pagans over the years, that abusive people seem to be extremely common within pagan communities. The reasons why have been discussed quite a bit at NAFPS, as a search would show.

Of course this doesn't mean all or even most pagans are bad people. Many pagans are themselves victims and survivors. If you go back to the start of the thread, you'll see the original post was hoping that at some point people within the pagan community would start to address the abuses that are so widespread, financial, emotional, physical, sexual. It's not something I as an outsider can do much more than encourage, but it's something I hope finally (FINALLY) happens, as I've been hoping to see it happen for it for years. After all, many of these same exploiters within paganism also abuse Native traditions.

The other debate about how much of modern paganism is recently invented or even just wishful thinking has also been talked about quite a bit in NAFPS, as a search would show.

[4Candles]

You said

'I've heard repeatedly from pagans over the years, that abusive people seem to be extremely common within pagan communities. '

'I am sorry you have had this experience and amazed that Pagans would come to you with the problem as we have a superb network of information and help sources worldwide. Help would always be available to them I think but I have never come across anyone needing help. I have been a Pagan for most of my 58 years and I have lived all over the UK. I have run groups and been a guest at a lot of others and have only ever found a lot of happy people. I have never heard of any abuse at all and am certain it is not 'extremely common within pagan communities.

With respect, you have to be in these communities to know. I would run a mile if I got a whiff of anything like this going on. Currently I run a 50 strong group and amongst them are many professional people including police officers, doctors, teachers etc. many of them belong to other groups too and there is no way they would be involved in anything abusive - quite the reverse. It most definitely not extremely common, in fact is so rare I have never heard of it! To say it is extremely common is misrepresenting a very large number of honest upright citizens and totally misleading.

You also said
'If you go back to the start of the thread, you'll see the original post was hoping that at some point people within the pagan community would start to address the abuses that are so widespread, financial, emotional, physical, sexual.'

Again, I would take issue with your description that it is widespread - it is unheard of here in the UK. Please don't think I am being argumentative with you, maybe it is different in your part of the world but in the UK it just isn't happening. If it was, I am sure the Pagan Federation would be addressing it immediately and so far, they haven't found the need to set up any kind of watchdog.

I suppose that I am deeply concerned with the fact that you are publicly saying abuse in the Pagan community is widespread when it isn't even there! I guess you will get exploiters in any walk of life but your comments are a bit like me saying it's common knowledge that Native Americans are sexual abusers and charge money for healing etc. The truth is, a handful of frauds probably do but that doesn't mean it is so commonplace that your people just accept it as normal. You fight it just the way we Pagans would if we came across it!

To set the record straight, your comment that [b] 'that abusive people seem to be extremely common within pagan communities.' [/b]is just not correct. It's rare and I have never seen it.

I thought I posted details of what the official statement from the Pagan Federation says in answer to who and what we are. I guess it didn't go through  so I will post it again when I have time. It is right that people know the truth about us and that we hate charlatans as much as you do.

On a last note, if anyone out there doubts my word I suggest they go on the world's biggest forum for Pagans. You will find it on www.witchcraft.org and there you can read all the forums. It is mostly youngsters who post (well the under 30's seem very young to me!) but you can see that none of them are claiming abuse. Although the owners of the website are in the Uk, the members of the site are from all over the world and there are tens of thousands of them registered as users. There is no forum dedicated to the abused because there is no need for one.

Bright blessings 

[Barnaby_McEwan]

Have just read this posting with interest as I am Pagan.

I've removed the 1700-word post pasted from some pagan FAQ page. If you must patronise us, a link would do. If you're not sure how to put links in your posts, look at the 'Help' pages available from the navigation bar near the top of each page. There is a 'Test' board where you can experiment without annoying the admins.

I think there is some confusion here...We tend to be more specific in the UK and only use the name Wicca to determine a small group of followers of Gardner.

No, there is no confusion. I'm British, and Wicca is used here in a much wider sense than that in my experience, including members of other 'traditions', 'solitaries', and so on. If you've been as intimately involved in neo-paganism as you say, you know this.

It would be very wrong and extremely insulting to the average Pagan to be told that they are involved in any sexually abusive regime.

With respect, you have to be in these communities to know.

Nobody said anything about a regime. It's an unpleasant fact that sexual predators will be attracted to a subculture which says that one of the members' benefits is the enjoyment of guilt-free sex; the more charismatic ones will thrive in such an environment. The whitedragon.co.uk page I quoted from above is written by someone 'in these communities'. It's one of the very few signs I've seen of neo-pagans brave enough to air that dirty little secret. Just to be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with enjoying sex. It's enabling abusers by denying there's a problem that I object to. Isn't there a saying that starts "An' it harm none..."? By the way the "Wiccan Rede" is derived from the occultist Aleister Crowley's dictum "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". Gardner just dressed it in hey-nonny-nonnyisms. Crowley in turn stole that from Rabelais' novel Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Paganism is the belief system of many thousands of years before Christianity came to our shores. It has nothing to do with Gerald Gardner...

That idea comes directly from Gardner's novel High Magic's Aid! Again, someone of your experience should know this. The anthropologist Margaret Murray first wrote about it in her long-discredited book The Witch Cult in Western Europe but it was Gardner's plagiarism which made it possible for you to believe it. All of contemporary neo-paganism is derived from the religion invented in the late 40s-early 50s by him and his fellow pioneers. Ronald Hutton's book The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft is very good on sources of neo-pagan myths. Despite what you may have heard, Hutton bends over backwards to be fair to his subject.

We call Paganism the old religion or the old ways because that is what it is.

Oh, right. So how often does your group throw its valuables into bodies of water? When practising human sacrifice, do you prefer strangling, burning or drowning? Last time you were entertaining visitors, did you proudly show off the preserved heads of your slain enemies? These are all things that pre-Christian Britons really did, as opposed to what some modern people like to imagine.

[4Candles]

I have decided not to dignify your ramblings with a lengthy reply. I don't know why you feel the need to be unpleasant to me and to all Pagans but perhaps in time you will lose the hatred and anger you feel. It's like a cancer inside you and it will hurt you long before it can affect others. Why the chip on your shoulder? If you really are British you will know we have a law against incitement of hatred against people of a particular belief system. I have now passed your details on to the relevant authorities. Amazingly it has been easy to find out a lot about you even though you keep all your details well hidden on your profile. I bet you remove this posting just in case people see you exposed as the biggest fraud of all. You're not actually British are you? If you were a native Brit you would know how to conduct yourself. Don't bother replying to me as I am just another Pagan who has decided to leave rather than be subjected to mindless bullying. I shall not bother coming back as it didn't really live up to expectations and intelligent conversation is barred apparently. Just go on with your lies if you like, only dimwits would take you seriously, especially the bit about normal guilt free sex with your partner which is probably why you removed my post. You know, the bit which said we do not have sex with all and sundry. You want everyone to believe otherwise don't you. It seems to fit in with your dirty mind. I detect a bit of a problem there.............................

[debbieredbear]

Oh geez, Barnaby. Are you shaking in your shoes? 

[Barnaby_McEwan]

I have decided not to dignify your ramblings with a lengthy reply.

You haven't dignified yourself much with two paragraphs of ad hominem attacks.

If you really are British you will know we have a law against incitement of hatred against people of a particular belief system. I have now passed your details on to the relevant authorities.

Wouldn't it be simpler to cast a spell on me than deal with all that paperwork?

Amazingly it has been easy to find out a lot about you even though you keep all your details well hidden on your profile.

Is this supposed to sound so stalkerish? I'm really not concerned if you find out a lot about me but why would you want to? If the cops or whoever are to investigate then they can find out what they need to know themselves.

I bet you remove this posting just in case people see you exposed as the biggest fraud of all.

You're 58 years old for goodness' sake! Didn't you feel just a bit childish when you typed that?

I am just another Pagan who has decided to leave rather than be subjected to mindless bullying. I shall not bother coming back as it didn't really live up to expectations and intelligent conversation is barred apparently. Just go on with your lies if you like, only dimwits would take you seriously, especially the bit about normal guilt free sex with your partner which is probably why you removed my post. You know, the bit which said we do not have sex with all and sundry. You want everyone to believe otherwise don't you. It seems to fit in with your dirty mind. I detect a bit of a problem there.............................

This makes no sense whatsoever. It's not our job to fulfil your expectations, and pointing out your ignorance of the history of your own religion is not bullying. Intelligent conversation is not barred: give it a try. Pasting in long, marginally-relevant articles without showing where they come from is frowned upon, as it is on most message boards. I'm clearly not trying to make people think that all neo-pagans are promiscuous or immoral; I'm trying to draw attention to a problem that it seems some people would rather we shut up about.

You are welcome to post a link to that FAQ and to show how it's relevant to the problem of fraud, charlatanry and sexual predation in neo-pagan communities. You are welcome to post evidence which disproves anything I've written here. You are not welcome to continue making a fool of yourself.

[educatedindian]

"we have a law against incitement of hatred against people of a particular belief system."

So if someone reports a Catholic priest abusing kids, he hates all Catholics? By your bizarre view, yes.

I'm not too impressed by that law. It didn't stop the airing of a racist anti Native commercial in Britain when we filed complaints against it.

4candle's long and comical denials remind me of jokes about the Italian Anti Defamation League back in the 70s. Whenever anyone talked about mafia corruption and crime, they'd come on TV saying "There ain't no such thing." Wasn't too credible, since their leaders WERE mafiosos. I'll take the word of dozens of pagans over one Pagan Fed leader either trying to cover her own tail, or having her head in the sand.

The language 4C uses brings up something interesting. It's almost word for word the usual Nuagespeak, all the usual condescending pop psychology diagnosis, attacks disguised as sympathetic advice, the martyr complex, etc. Since Wicca predates Nuage by almost 20 years, were Wiccans talking like this before Nuage?